03.27.10
Posted in you've got mail at 11:32 am by nemo
RG mail
The crisis is an opportunity to sweep away the rotten postwar settlement
of British politics. Labour is moribund. But David Cameron has a chance to
develop a “red Tory” communitarianism, socially conservative but sceptical
of neoliberal economics
by Phillip Blond
prospectmagazine.co.uk (February 28 2009)
We live in a time of crisis. In such times humans retreat to safety, and
build bulwarks against the future. The financial emergency is having this
effect on Britain’s governing class. Labour has withdrawn to the safety of
the sheltering state, and the comforts of its first income tax rise since
the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be proposing a
repeat of Thatcherite austerity in the face of economic catastrophe. But
this crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a
disintegration of the idea of the “market state” and makes obsolete the
political consensus of the last thirty years. A fresh analysis of the
ruling ideological orthodoxy is required. Certainly, this new thinking
isn’t going to come from the left. New Labour is intellectually dead,
while Gordon Brown promises an indebted return to a now-defunct status
quo. But, in truth, Brown’s reconversion from post-socialist free
marketeer to state interventionist is only plausible because the
Conservatives have failed to develop an alternative political economy that
explains the crisis, and charts a different future free of the now
bankrupt orthodoxies. Until this is achieved, Brown’s claim that the
Conservatives are the “do nothing” party has real traction, and makes the
result of the next election far from assured.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/02/riseoftheredtories/
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:30 am by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/opinion/25harder.html
March 25, 2010
Op-Ed Contributors
Too-Busy Bees
By MARCELO AIZEN and LAWRENCE HARDER
IN the past five years, as the phenomenon known as colony-collapse disorder has spread across the United States and Europe, causing the disappearance of whole colonies of domesticated honeybees, many people have come to fear that our food supply is in peril. The news on Wednesday that a Department of Agriculture survey found that American honeybees had died in great numbers this winter can only add to such fears.
The truth, fortunately, is not nearly so dire. But it is more complicated.
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03.26.10
Posted in physics at 5:53 pm by nemo
Quantum physics again proves a theistic God
Priest and accommodationist John Polkinghorne, previously a physicist at Cambridge University, and author of some of the most muddled apologetics I’ve ever read, gets interviewed by In Character.
And he reveals that quantum physics has been just great for theology, because a stupid old Newtonian universe would testify only to a deistic, wind-up-the-universe-and-let-it-go kind of God. Quantum physics, however, provides a theistic God, one who changes the world by tweaking electrons.
I agree that the abuse of QM has gone on for a long time, from many sources. But the usual interpretation of QM often fails to see how strange the subject is.
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Posted in environment at 5:47 pm by nemo
Pollution from Asia Circles Globe at Stratospheric Heights
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — The economic growth across much of Asia comes with a troubling side effect: pollutants from the region are being wafted up to the stratosphere during monsoon season. The new finding, in a study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, provides additional evidence of the global nature of air pollution and its effects far above Earth’s surface.
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Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 5:44 pm by nemo
History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?
The question of ‘evolution in history’, visible in the Axial period and its gestation of religions is one of the most elusive answers to the question of evolution and religion. And yet the scientific/Darwinian substitute is unable to penetrate the logic of religious history/evolution.
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Posted in The Eonic Effect at 5:21 pm by nemo
A email exchange at history and theory listserve: I try to show that a ‘science of history’ can’t work in conventional terms and then
to the suggestion that the eonic effect demonstrates nature’s solution
to the problem.
John Landon admin@history-and-evolution.com
Subject: RE: On the causal mechanics of history
This project to create a science of history assumes that history is like physics, but it not like physics at all Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in religion at 3:20 pm by nemo
The use of the term ‘god’ by theists and atheists alike has become so confused that one must finally take refuge in agnostic silence and a demand for a changed terminology.
Jews and Christians seem to think they have a monopoly on both ‘god’ and ‘religion’, but the reality that their ‘religions’ have long since been degenerated versions of vulgar theism, warned of by ancient first monotheists who were wary of using god language at all.
The referent IHVH is a reminder that Christians/Jews (throw in Moslems) don’t know what they are talking about on ‘god’, and have corrupted the language to the point that one must abandan their religions, this having nothing to do with atheism.
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Posted in General at 2:56 pm by nemo
The idea that we should ditch religion (see earlier post today on Harris), like most of the ideas ruined by the New Atheists, is one that I seriously entertained for many years. Seeing it picked up by the cult of atheist scientism is to watch the idea turned into something never meant and dangerous if it ever came about.
I think that culture is moving beyond the phase of Axial Age religions, but as the New Age movement shows the result is to attempt to recreate religion, however perilous that task, and to move into a new phase of human spiritual endeavor and knowledge.
The idea now promoted by scientists that everything to do with the greater sphere of human religion is pseudo-science, or in the idiot phrase of Shermer, woo woo, is an alarming invitatioin to reduce humanity to complete ignorance of man’s spiritual history, and to encapsulate him in a box of scientific superstition.
The discussion created by skeptics, humanists, and New Atheists is so narrow and cliched and so focussed on the metaphysics of god that to equate the whole question with religion as a whole is both misleading and finally dangerous.
I am struck by the stupidity of the New Atheists and the way they have made long-standing debates here unsustainable. Indeed, it is dangerous to even call oneself an atheist anymore such is the confused semantics now put on the term by these adolescent loudmouths.
The questions of religion have generally been distorted by those religions themselves. So we can aspire to either move beyond religion or to consider the issues that are invariant to man’s greater culture that religion has coopted.
One has very few options left! Christians have made the use of the term ‘god’ impossible, while the New Atheist force atheists to change their label.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 2:43 pm by nemo
Deepak Chopra Debates Existence Of Higher Power With Skeptics On ABC’s Nightline (VIDEO)
I haven’t seen the videos, but, while the perspecitve of Shermer and Harris is the usual stupidity of scientists on religion, Chopra and Houston seem to sliding into the ‘god’ formulations created by the debate itself. Chopra and Houston as New Agers should know better, and we see the phenomenon whereby atheistic Buddhism and much Indian religion is recast with a false front of theism to travel in the West.
It is important to bypass the atheism/theism dilemma which is mostly false and focus on the deafness created by scientism, and the sheer idiocy of skeptic scientists.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:36 pm by nemo
Microbes breathe life into oxygen theory
by cbc.ca
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5328
A new study of methane-munching microbes adds weight to the idea that bacteria were producing oxygen on Earth before photosynthesis evolved.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 2:19 pm by nemo
Philosopher: Why we should ditch religion
by John D. Sutter – CNN
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5329
Sam Harris is a two timer. He has his fingers in Vedanta wing of the Hinduism pie, and wants us to remain ignorant of man’s evolutionary potential.
Perhaps public knowledge of enlighenment should be banned.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:14 pm by nemo
Is this a new species of human being?
Scientists have extracted DNA from a bone discovered in Siberia that almost certainly belongs to a new kind of human – one that may have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago. Will this transform our views of human evolution?
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Posted in Evolution at 2:12 pm by nemo
Calling All Girls — Here’s Someone You Need to Meet
By Shelley Emling
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/26/shelley-emling-girls-science-dinosaurs-mary-anning-darwin/
Girls need female role models to inspire them to consider a career in science or math. They should learn more about Britain’s Mary Anning.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:09 pm by nemo
The party poopers at Darwin’s 200th birthday
Following mainstream scientists’ celebration of Darwin’s big birthday last year, two new books argue that Darwin’s theory is not all it’s cracked up to be. Are they on to anything?
by John Gillott
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Posted in Evolution at 2:08 pm by nemo
It is now blasphemy to criticise Darwin
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong (reviewed in this issue of the spiked review of books), says Darwinism has become a new secular faith that you transgress at your peril.
by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 2:05 pm by nemo
Dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch? Earth Has Entered New Age of Geological Time, Experts Say
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner — who suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:03 pm by nemo
First Ever Southern Tyrannosaur Dinosaur Discovered
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — Scientists from Cambridge, London and Melbourne have found the first ever evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs existed in the southern continents.
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Posted in biology at 2:02 pm by nemo
Plant Breeding Breakthrough: Offspring With Genes from Only One Parent
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Posted in Evolution at 1:36 pm by nemo
New Bird Fossil Hints at More Undiscovered Chinese Treasures
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2010) — The study of Mesozoic birds and the dinosaur-bird transition is one of the most exciting and vigorous fields in vertebrate paleontology today. A newly described bird from the Jehol Biota of northeast China suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time, and that the rocks still have many secrets to reveal.
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Posted in General at 1:35 pm by nemo
Surgeons Transplant New Trachea Into Child Using His Own Stem Cells to Rebuild Airway
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2010) — UCL scientists and surgeons have led a revolutionary operation to transplant a new trachea into a child, using the child’s own stem cells to rebuild the airway in the body.
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Posted in global warming at 1:33 pm by nemo
Highly charged motoring
Fast cars will go even faster with electric power
Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
SOME people think sports cars are threatened with extinction by tightening restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions and unacceptable fuel-guzzling. They fear the roar of the V8 will be replaced by the whirr of the electric armature—and that motoring will never be the same again. Well, it ought to be quieter, that is true. But the Jeremy Clarksons and J. Bonington Jagworths of this world need not fear that it will be slower.
The secret (whisper it, lest puritanical greens find out) is that electric motors are better than combustion engines.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:29 pm by nemo
Corporate Whines
The Looming Trade War With China
By MIKE WHITNEY
A war of words has broken out between China and the United States and the pundits are predicting that it will end in a full-blown trade war. The Obama administration thinks that China is manipulating its currency to gain an unfair trade advantage and increase its exports. China’s Premier Wen Jiabao’s adamantly denies the charge. “I do not think the renminbi is undervalued” he says. “And we are opposed to countries pointing fingers at each other or taking strong measures to force other countries to appreciate their currencies….If the United States uses the exchange rate to start a new trade war, China will be hurt. But the American people and US companies will be hurt even more.”
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:26 pm by nemo
gnxp
“I THINK therefore I am,” said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: “I act, therefore I think.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527535.100-mind-over-matter-how-your-body-does-your-thinking.html?full=true
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:25 pm by nemo
gnxp
The disparity between experiments that suggest sophisticated cognition in animals and those that find hard limits to animal intelligence has created a debate over animal “personhood”
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/are_animals_people/
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:24 pm by nemo
gnxp
A British psychiatrist has kicked up a bit of a ruckus by arguing that mothers who hire nannies to raise their sons may inadvertently be creating future adulterers
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1975371,00.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:22 pm by nemo
gnxp
The rise of marriage therapy, and other dreams of human betterment
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/29/100329crat_atlarge_lepore?currentPage=all
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:20 pm by nemo
Democrats Face Threats from Incited Right
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/03/25
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